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La Biennale Internazionale dell'Antiquariato di Firenze 2024

Past exhibition
26 September - 6 October 2024
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Antonio Susini, A pacing bull, c. 1650

Antonio Susini

A pacing bull, c. 1650
Bronze; on a green marble base
23.3 x 26.8 x 8.5 cm
height including base: 35.2 cm
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Provenance

Private Collection, UK.

This exceptional cast of a pacing bull bears close comparison with other bronzes by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Francesco Susini. Bulls had been revered since antiquity for their strength and vigour, and the popular model of the pacing bull was originally conceived by Giambologna as a pendant to a pacing horse. Giambologna’s leading assistant Antonio Susini, Gianfrancesco’s uncle, is believed to have remodelled Giambologna’s bull, and it is this model which the current bronze closely follows.


Giovanni Francesco Susini began his studies in the workshop of his uncle Antonio, the most talented assistant of the Medici court sculptor Giambologna. During his own training, Giovanni was hired as an apprentice in Giambologna’s workshop, and in 1624 he travelled to Rome, where he had the opportunity to study newly unearthed antiquities. Although he was engaged in major public commissions for civic and religious sculptures, and carried out work for private patrons including the Medici, Susini remains best known as a caster of bronze. After the death of his uncle, Giovanni took over the management of the family bronze foundry. Filippo Baldinucci, Giambologna’s early biographer, recorded that Giovanni and Antonio Susini retained Giambologna’s models after the master’s death in 1608 and continued to cast from them. As a result of this and the quality of its output, the Susini workshop was continually employed by the Medici family.


Giambologna’s sculpture of a pacing bull after the antique is documented as early as the late 16th Century. In 1573, Giambologna is recorded as having been paid by Jacopo di Alamanno Salviati, a cousin of Grand Duke Cosimo I, for a bronze bull[1], while a version appears in 1588 in a posthumous inventory of the collection of Francesco de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had died the previous year.[2] Further mention of Giambologna’s model appears in an inventory of the collection of Benedetto Gondi, from 1609: ‘un toro di cera di mano del detto [Giambologna]’. This version is referred to as the Type A model, and among the finest extant casts are those in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, an ex-Medici piece (inv. no. 287[3]) and that in the Hill collection in New York (fig. 1).[4] It features a stockier, more robust animal with a more prominent dewlap in comparison to Susini’s version.


Using this Type A model as a template while working in Giambologna’s studio, Antonio Susini then created a second sculpture, known by scholars as the Type B model. The Type B composition elaborates on Giambologna’s invention, stylising its massive girth into a sleeker anatomy. The more diminutive muzzle is held erect, the dewlap is lighter and less fleshy, and the hide between the horns is given an exquisite graphic rendering as opposed to the Type A bull’s more sculptural treatment. Both models would have been inherited by Giovanni when he took over the Susini workshop in 1624 and were cast by him, as well as by another artist, Pietro Tacca.

The present variant can be traced back to a statuette, now in the Galleria Colonna, Rome, that was commissioned in 1628 by Jacopo di Lorenzo Salviati from Giovanni Francesco Susini. The present bronze is comparable in its outstanding quality to the Colonna statuette. The cast displays the fine chasing, delicate tool marks and rich patina consistent with the work of Giovanni Francesco Susini. In its finishing it is almost identical to a version cast by Giovanni Francesco Susini which was acquired in 1696 by Prince Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein and which remains in the Princely collections.[1] Susini appears to have made slight variations to the finish of each cast; for example, in the Liechtenstein cast the bull’s ears are bare, whereas in our cast the sculptor has added finely-detailed strands of hair to the edges of the ears. On the present bronze the bull’s sheath has been extended and is more extensively tooled.

Other known casts include a bronze attributed to Giovanni Francesco Susini sold at Sotheby’s[6] and one in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, attributed to Antonio and Giovanni Francesco Susini. The facture and finish of the present bronze are similar to the Lion Attacking a Horse and Lion Attacking a Bull attributed to Antonio or Giovanni Francesco Susini in The Getty Museum, California.[7]


It is worth noting that one early visual record of a cast appears in Willem van Haecht’s 1628 painting depicting the kunstkammer of the Antwerp-based collector Cornelis van der Geest (fig. 2). A bronze likely based on this composition was also recorded in the 1652 inventory of Jan van Meurs’s collection in Antwerp.


[1] H. Keutner, in E. Safarik, ed., Galleria Colonna in Roma, Rome, 1990, p. 301.

[2] ‘uno toro di bronzo di Giobologna di braccia 0/2 incirca’; see P. Barocchi & G. Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo mediceo e storia artistica, Florence, 2002, vol. I, p. 330.

[3] C. Avery & A. Radcliffe, eds., Giambologna 1529 – 1608: Sculptor to the Medici, exh. cat., Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, 19 Aug. – 10 Sept. 1978, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 5 Oct. – 16 Nov. 1978, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2 Dec. 1978 – 28 Jan. 1979, p. 192, no. 177.

[4] P. Wengraf, Renaissance & Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection, London, 2014, pp. 118-24, no. 6.

[5] Inv. no. SK553

[6] Anon. Sale; Sotheby’s New York, 29 January 2009, lot 345.

[7] Inv. nos. 94.SB.11.1-2.

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